Minerva

Overview:

This
project will continue work from a previous NSF Minerva grant Modeling Discourse
and Social Dynamics in Authoritarian Regimes (NSF#0904909) to analyze the
speeches of international actors to detect motives, identify threats, and find
predictive patterns of language and behavior. The project has three components:
identifying language patterns related to armed political crises; identifying
bluffs and threats pertinent to both national and international security; and
analyzing the relationship between language and contentious behavior like
protests, riots, and rebellions. We want to extend our analysis beyond the
existing corpora which focus heavily on China and the Middle East/North Africa
regions to encompass Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, where there are
growing security threats and ample opportunities to collect and analyze
linguistic data.